Yesterday's Dangerous Idea Is Today's Orthodoxy And

I Suspect The Reason Is That Most People [...] Have A Residue Of Feeling That Darwinian Evolution Isn't Quite Big Enough To Explain Everything About Life. All I Can Say As A Biologist Is That The Feeling Disappears Progressively The More You Read About And Study What Is Known About Life And Evolution. I Want To Add One Thing More. The More You Understand The Significance Of Evolution, The More You Are Pushed Away From The Agnostic Position And Towards Atheism. Complex, Statistically Improbable Things Are By Their Nature More Difficult To Explain Than Simple, Statistically Probable Things.

The Bitter Hatreds That Now Poison Middle Eastern Politics Are Rooted In The Real Or Perceived Wrong Of The Setting Up Of A Jewish State In An Islamic Region. In View Of All That The Jews Had Been Through, It Must Have Seemed A Fair And Humane Solution. Probably Deep Familiarity With The Old Testament Had Given The European And American Decision-makers Some Sort Of Idea That This Really Was The Historic Homeland Of The Jews.

Suppose That There's A Gene That Makes You Gay If You Were Bottle-fed But That Has Some Completely Different Effect If You Were Breast-fed. So In The Days Before Bottles Were Invented That Gene Would Not Have Manifested Itself As Gay Behavior, But Now That Bottles Are Common It Can Do So.

Compassionate Doctors Sometimes Lie To Patients About The Severity Of Their Condition, And It Is Not Always Wrong To Do So.

I Think That [paul] Bloom's Approach - And Others Who Take It - Is Not So Much That There Is A Precise Genetic Basis To Faith. But There Is A Genetic Basis To A Psychological Predisposition That Manifests Itself As Faith And Religion Under The Right Conditions.